An Existentialist Study Of Robert Frost’s Desert Places

Robert Frost is a terrifying poet who created modern desert places like Eliot, but under the cover of harmonious idyll which is different from Eliot’s direct description of the morbid and filthy Waste Land. Frost’s poems are filled with loneliness and alienation, presenting a broken, hostile and envious New England rural community with an isolated onlooker.There lies surprising similarity between Kierkegaard and Frost, no matter in their thoughts or life experiences. They were both devout believers, but suffered a lot then encountered religious conflict, finally, they returned to the religious sphere to achieve fulfillment."Existence of individual" is either Kierkegaard’s starting point of philosophy or the pilot of Robert Frost’s poetic art.The main content of this thesis is to investigate the desert places of Robert Frost’s poetry with Kierkegaard’s three-existence-sphere theory which echoes the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres embodied in Frost’s poems. Chapter one discusses Frost’s esthetic sphere of existence in three aspects to find nothing but despair. Chapter two discovers the guilt in Frost’s ethical sphere of existence by criticizing the infinite requirement of ethics. Finally, chapter three highlights the fulfillment of existence which comes from the religious sphere.